Today's 'Even Aerospace Engineers Have a Sense of Humor' Entry

Check out Flight Aware's track of the route of the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Group's flight 236 yesterday. This is the route the plane actually took, as logged by Air Traffic Control radar. Look at it for a minute, if you don't get the point immediately. Hint: the aircraft in question was a "Dreamliner," aka Boeing 787. Another hint is in the upper left hand corner of this page.

I recall a similar flight track a while back by a Boeing 747, without the fancy curvilinear fillip* at the end.

As a feat of flight planning, and of exhaustive Lat/Long entry into the plane's GPS-based autopilots, this is quite something. The coordinates for the route are after the jump, if you'd like to try it yourself (and have a plane with the range of a 787.) Nicely done, and thanks to JDK and TMF for the tip.__* Yes, I know it's not just a curlicue...

Here is the route that led to the pattern shown by Flight Aware. Aviation buffs will recognize the combination of VORs (ONL, FOD, GYZ, and so on); "normal" fixes (HANKI, ALPOE, and so on); and Lat-Long specifications.

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James Fallows is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the 2018 book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which was a national best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.